


An Important Lesson on Symbols

by OrdinaryBird



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 22:25:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3586281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrdinaryBird/pseuds/OrdinaryBird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>College student Carlos learns what a lab coat signifies. (For "Lab Coat" day of Carlos Appreciation Week)</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Important Lesson on Symbols

Before college, Carlos had never attempted to live with someone he wasn’t related to, much less a peer. Apparently he had no choice in the matter now, though.

He wasn’t in the dorm room much anyway; he spent a lot of his first semester in the lab, and split the following three between the lab and a string of lovers in hot, bright sparks that burned fast and faded quickly. He didn’t go out to bars or parties. There simply wasn’t the time.

There was always work to be done, always distraction from the lost loves and the empty places they left behind. And anyway, he was one of the first students on his floor to save enough work-study money for a PC in his dorm room, and learning that was time consuming.

“How do you meet people?” his roommate asked once. Lacrosse practice (was it lacrosse? Probably. Some sport.) had been cancelled, so they were actually in the room at the same time. Ryan was lying on his lofted bed, his freckled face half in shadows, his eyes closed. “I mean…no offense, but I didn’t think there were that many, you know, guys like you on campus. It’s like you’ve dated all of them by this point.”

“Like me how?” Carlos knew what he meant, but he kept his voice carefully level and his eyes forward. _Dig yourself out of this one_ , he thought aggressively in Ryan’s direction.

“Oh, you know. I just mean. Like. You know.”

“Oh, of course.” He realized too late that his voice rose a little so he could hear himself over his own rapidly beating heart. “You mean…not heterosexual.”

“Well yeah. I guess. Gay. Or at least. You know.”

“Interested.” Carlos bounced his foot under his desk and looked out the window. There was silence.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just, like, you’re the first homo I’ve met and like I would have had no idea except for the part where you’ve had like twelve boyfriends already so, I mean—how do you tell?”

Silence again.

“Am I being offensive? I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” And it was. After a fashion. The tense expectation twisted his stomach up and it would be difficult to calm down; he was ready for confrontation and still wary of where the conversation would go. “Generally speaking, if a man kisses you, it’s likely he’s at least formed the hypothesis and is interested in organizing an experiment. If you take my meaning.” _Ohmygod Carlos come ON did you really just use a science metaphor?_

“Okay. Sure. Yeah.” Ryan rolled over, his head lolling off the side of the bed. “Anyway, I was only asking because—I mean I know we don’t hang out or anything, but—when did you break up with Jim?”

Oh, right. Jim was the captain of the lacrosse team. So of course that would have gotten Ryan’s attention. “That was like a month ago. He’s already dating someone else.”

“Yeah. A girl.” Confusion pitched Ryan’s voice upwards. “I mean, did he change his mind?”

“I don’t know.” Carlos swiveled back towards his computer and started typing again, a little more vigorously than may have been necessary. He wanted _out_ of this conversation. “I haven’t asked. He ended it. Anyway, it’s—it’s whatever.”

“Okay.” And then, “sorry.”

After another pause, “Are you, like, okay about it?”

“Yeah.” Carlos licked his dry lips and started puttering with the back of the monitor. _Why do you suddenly care?_ “I have too much work to do this semester so it’s…whatever.” _Why am I telling you this?_

“Oh. Oh, okay, good.”

Carlos mucked with the computer for a full five minutes of polite silence before he stood calmly, put his sneakers on, and left for the safety of the Life Sciences building.

 

He watched the fruit flies in his experimental habitat. The other students were looking for particular, known mutations—white-eyed males, curled wings, that sort of thing—but Carlos had had bigger plans. He couldn’t contain his excitement when he talked about it. Not to his professor, Dr. West, a round and abrasive old man whose icy face melted slowly before he signed off on the special project. Not to Ryan, in an uncharacteristic rush of words, who responded with confused politeness, and as a philosophy major had nothing to add.

And not to Jim, who didn’t understand it at all. _Why do you want to breed fruit flies that can recognize letters? Do you want to teach them to read?_

_No! I don’t think their brains could handle it. I just think I know how to do it. Wouldn’t that be neat?_

_But…why, though?_

_Why not?_

Those questions, he’d realized later, illustrated the fundamental difference between them. Jim, two semesters from a B.A. in European History, saw what was. Which was usually a good balance for Carlos, who only had eyes for what could be or what might be just beyond what we already know is. He thought he needed feet on the ground. He fell in love, hard and fast, with composure and certainty, with a solid eye on the known, with stability.

Jim was the one who ended things for good, but Carlos saw it coming after six months. He’d sketched the pine forest behind his dorm, old and impressive, which Jim often looked at and talked about as a symbol of man’s impermanence and the triumph of nature even in sight of all of this development. All Carlos saw was an exciting ecosystem, but he let it go. Symbols were important to Jim, Jim was important to Carlos, so he would try to see his own impermanence in the woods.

He rolled the sketch and put it aside. After much thought, he tied a red ribbon around it.

Jim smiled at it, thanked him. If he recognized the subject as that particular forest, he didn’t say.

He’d handed Carlos a carefully wrapped, soft bundle. A little card said, in Jim’s angular, scratchy handwriting, _for my mad scientist_. Inside was a folded white lab coat.

Jim burst out laughing. He was, at that point, a little drunk. “Isn’t it great? You are a very proper scientist and all proper scientists need a proper lab coat. C’mere.”

He’d grabbed Carlos by the hand and pulled him towards the chipped mirror on the back of the door. His short and familiar fingers unzipped the hooded sweatshirt and slipped it off his shoulders, the touch lingering. He moved behind him and held the coat open, then adjusted the shoulders, slipping his arms around his waist, watching Carlos watch himself in the mirror.

“What do you think?”

“I think…” Carlos swallowed hard. “I don’t know what to think.”

“It looks good on you. And honestly I think you should wear them more often. Show your commitment to your first love.”

Carlos whipped around, heart thundering. “What do you mean by that?” he choked out.

“Oh come on, hun. I know.” Jim’s voice was casual but there was a hard edge in his eye. “I’m your mistress. This—” he ran his fingers under the lapels of the lab coat, “—this is your wife.”

And now, staring at the flies, biting down hard on the drawstring of his pullover to keep the lump in his throat under control, the words twisted his chest again and he swallowed hard. His flies were doing well. The white-eyed males were making more progress toward the letter recognition, although the red-eyed weren’t too far behind.

He was smart. He was capable. He was teaching flies what the letter _H_ looked like.

He was alone.

“They’re closing down the building soon. You should get going, you don’t want to get locked in again.”

He turned to see Dr. West, his instructor, watching him from the door. His face wasn’t as hard as it had been in the beginning of the semester. He seemed to like Carlos.

He rose silently and put the cover back on the habitat, brushing some of the bright blue fly food from his jeans.

“That stuff stains,” Dr. West offered.

Carlos shrugged, holding his face carefully. “It’s fine,” he said, through gritted teeth.

“You do realize that this,” Dr. West said, pulling at the hem of his lab coat, “isn’t just a way of attracting the opposite sex to your massive intellect? It does, in fact, serve a function.”

Carlos laughed, a loud, bitter “HA!” before catching himself and clearing his throat. “I’m not too worried about that.”

“Or the same sex, for that matter.”

They locked eyes for a moment—West with an eyebrow cocked and a half smile, Carlos trying not to let his thundering panic show on his face. “Well,” he said finally, “I don’t really have to worry about that either. All I have is these guys.” He waved back towards his covered flies.

“You know, after she helped you register, Helen told me about your first meeting. In detail. With rum. As exasperated as she was, she did express sincere admiration. And I have to say, I agree. You’re a natural scientist. I don’t feel like I’m teaching you to walk. I’m watching you run. Metaphorically speaking.”

In the silence that followed, he cleared his throat and said, “In any event. If any of my students deserve to wear the coat, it’s you.”

“It’s not—!” Carlos burst out, then pressed a fist hard against his lips. “It’s not any kind of symbol. It’s protective gear and I’m not worried about getting fly food on my clothes so it doesn’t. matter.”

Dr. West laughed and settled himself on a chair, hanging his cane from the edge of the table. “What makes you think it’s not a symbol? The humanities aren’t the only subjects that get to enjoy the power of signifiers. It means—it means you’re at work. It means you’re observing, you’re studying and analysing and attentive and invested. It’s something one wears when one is making the most of one’s gifts.”

Stuck without words, Carlos pulled off his glasses and scrubbed one of the lenses on the sleeve of his sweatshirt, smearing it with the grainy blue spot of fly food he hadn’t noticed before. _How did that shit get everywhere?_

“You’re the only one of my students in this class who takes their work with them when they leave my classroom.” Dr. West rose with a sigh, leaning heavily on his cane. “Anyway. You should invest in a lab coat. It doesn’t have to mean anything to you yet, but I hope someday it does.”

 

Ryan was out when he got back to the dorm room. Carlos opened a drawer and started digging through the partially folded t-shirts and unmated socks. The white coat was at the bottom. He hadn’t been able to make himself get rid of it.

It was smooth and stiff, a little wrinkled. He shook it out and pulled his sweatshirt over his head, then pulled the coat on. He was facing away from the mirror. He didn’t want to see, didn’t need the ghost of heartbreak looking over his shoulder, wrapping its arms around him.

He looked down instead. His mud-stained sneakers, the hem of his jeans. The white curve of the clean lab coat, just the right length. He slipped his hands into the wide, square pockets, thought of what they could hold.

Still without looking in the mirror, he let his face relax, casting a bittersweet, vulnerable smile at the darkened window. The smile stayed as he sat in his desk chair and got back to work.


End file.
